Living My Life - Emma Goldman [192]
The sublime and the ridiculous often overlap each other. At the height of all the worry and anxiety about the San Francisco situation, while on my way to Portland with Ben, he was seized with one of his periodic fits to “nurse his soul, tabulate his ideas, and get acquainted with himself.” His plaint was again that he could not continue for ever a “mere office boy,” carrying bundles and selling literature; he had other ambitions; he wanted to write. He had wanted to write all along, he said, but I had never given him the chance. Sasha, he declared, was my god, Sasha’s life and work my religion. In every difficulty that had arisen between him and Sasha I had always sided with the latter, he said. Ben had never been permitted his way in anything; I had even denied him his longing for a child. He insisted he had not forgotten that I had told him I had made my choice and that I could not allow a child to handicap my work in the movement. My attitude had hung over him like a pall, he declared, and it had made him afraid to confess that he had been living with another girl. His yearning for a child, always very strong, had become more compelling since he had met that girl. During his imprisonment in the Queens County Jail he had determined to allow nothing to stand in the way of the fulfilment of his great wish.
“But you have a child,” I said, “your little Helen! Have you ever shown paternal love for her, or even the least interest, except on Valentine’s Day, when I would pick out your cards for her?”
He was only a mere youth when the child was born, he replied; and the whole thing had been an accident. Now he was thirty-eight, with a “conscious feeling for fatherhood.”
I knew there was no use in arguing. Unlike his confession in the first year of our love, which had struck me like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky, this new disclosure hardly shocked or wounded me. The other had left scars too deep to heal or ever to allow me freedom from doubt. I had always guessed his deceptions; so accurately, indeed, that he called me a Sherlock Holmes “from whose eyes nothing is hidden.”
Peculiar irony of circumstances! In New York Ben had started a “Sunday-school class,” which exposed me to the ridicule of my comrades. “A Sunday-school in an anarchist office!” they laughed; “Jesus in the sanctum of the atheist.” I sided with Ben. Free speech included his right to Jesus, I said. I knew that Ben was no more a Christian than the millions of others who proclaim themselves followers of the Nazarene. It was rather the personality of the “Son of Man” that appealed to Ben, as it had ever since his early youth. His religious sentimentalism would do no thinking person any harm, I thought. Most of his Sunday-school pupils were girls who were much more attracted to their teacher than to his Lord. I felt that Ben’s religious emotionalism was stronger than his anarchistic convictions, and I could not deny him his right of expression.
To maintain consistency in a world of crass contradictions is not easy, and I had frequently been anything but consistent in regard to Ben. His love-affairs with all sorts of women had caused me too many emotional upheavals to allow me to act always in consonance with my ideas. Time, however, is a great leveller of feeling. I no longer cared about Ben’s erotic adventures, and his newest confession did not affect me deeply. But it was indeed the height of tragicomedy that my stand in favour of Ben’s Sunday-school in the Mother Earth office should result in an affair with one of his girl pupils. And then my anxiety about leaving Ben in the jail and going on tour without him at the very time he was absorbed in his new obsession! It was all so absurd and grotesque—I felt unutterably weary and possessed only of a desire to get away somewhere and forget the failure of my personal life, to forget even the cruel urge to struggle for an ideal.
I decided to go to Provincetown for a month, to visit with Stella and her baby. With them I would rest and perhaps find peace, peace.